David Panian: Ukraine crisis a personal matter

Saturday

Mar 15, 2014 at 2:46 PM

By David PanianDaily Telegram News Editor

About this time seven years ago, I was having dinner with a number of reporters from around the world in Munich, Germany. We were there to cover Wacker Chemie’s annual press briefing. Across the table from me was a young woman from Ukraine. We ended up talking a little bit about hockey with another woman, a native of the Upper Peninsula.

Those few days in Germany led to a penpal-type friendship. So when Russia invaded Crimea and moved thousands of troops to its border with Ukraine, I had to email Tanya, who now lives in Germany with her husband and son, to ask how her family was doing and what reactions she had heard about the invasion. She’s from Dnepropetrovsk, a city of 1 million people in the central part of the country. It’s perhaps best known in the U.S. as the hometown of Olympic gold medal figure skater Oksana Baiul.

Tanya told me no one she knows wants to be part of Russia, and her friend in Crimea said people there will do what they can to stay part of Ukraine. She said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions have only served to unite Ukrainians.

Then I met Albina Sakhnyuk, the exchange student Daily Telegram reporter John Mulcahy wrote about in last Sunday’s paper. Albina is also from a city in central Ukraine. She attends Adrian High School and is staying with Jeff and Elizabeth Rising’s family. She expressed similar sentiments to Tanya’s.

I wanted to meet Albina because of my friendship with Tanya and my experiences working with exchange students through Rotary International. Plus, it’s fun meeting people from other countries. When I hear about something happening in Scotland, I think about my friend Glenn. When Bavaria is in the news, I think of the people I’ve met there through trips to Wacker’s headquarters and my Aunt Patti and Uncle Tom.

A goal of exchange programs like the one Albina is in or Rotary Youth Exchange is to build understanding amongst people to achieve world peace. It’s a lofty, but worthy, goal, especially considering something happening like Putin’s power play in Crimea that threatens to bring war back to Europe.

That’s not to say that if only Putin was friendly with Ukrainians that this wouldn’t be happening. I’m sure he’s friends with several Ukrainians, especially the ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych. This land grab was obviously premeditated — Putin just needed something like the protests against Yanukovych’s government to happen to create unrest that he could claim threatened ethnic Russians’ lives. But what happens when Ukrainians decide they like having an independent country?

As a child of the Cold War — the Berlin Wall fell during my senior year of high school — the idea of war with Russia freaks me out. Movies like “Fail-Safe,” “WarGames” and “The Day After” may seem hokey to younger people, but in their times they illustrated commonly held fears that we were one mistake or nutjob away from being obliterated in a nuclear firestorm.

Now it looks like Russia has a nutjob with his finger on the button. He’s done something akin to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, except he, unlike Hussein, has the nuclear weapons that he thinks will deter the West from pushing him back. Or maybe he just thinks his military might without nukes is enough of a deterrent.

I hope the economic sanctions and other diplomatic pressure can convince Putin to pull out of Crimea. But I won’t be surprised if war breaks out in Crimea and maybe elsewhere in Ukraine. Albina said Ukrainian men are enlisting in the military. Tanya says the Ukrainian military will fight to protect the country’s sovereignty, but that she prays for peace.

That’s what I want too. Of course, every rational person wants peace. But in this instance, it’s more personal because I now know people who would be affected if war comes to their homeland.

David Panian is The Daily Telegram’s news editor. Contact him at 265-5111, ext. 265, or dpanian@lenconnect.com. Follow him on Twitter: @lenaweepanian.